Ordinals NFT fever is coming to Ethereum via Ethscriptions, a new protocol that allows arbitrary data to be enrolled or recorded on the smart contract network blockchain. The first wave of these inscriptions are NFTs or digital artifacts in image format. According to Tom Lehman, co-founder of music platform Genius and creator of Ethscriptions, the protocol it works similarly to Ordinals y uses “call data [calldata] of transactions” in Ethereum. A calldata is a field where the functions of the transactions or calls to smart contracts are stored and works as a memory, since this data cannot be modified. “Because copying between memory and storage can be quite expensive, specifying a location can be useful to control gas spend at times,” explains Yimaz, a smart contract developer, at Stack Exchange.
Any Ethereum transaction whose input data is the transaction hash of a valid Ethscriptions is a valid Ethscriptions transfer, as long as the sender of the transaction is the owner of the Ethscriptions. Tom Lehman, co-founder of Genius and creator of Ethscription.
As a consequence, Ethscription provides a method to enroll “digital artifacts” on Ethereum, as Lehman calls them, it is less expensive than known methods of registration via smart contracts.
Most NFT projects use external servers to manage collections, a method that by definition is centralized. The Ethscription protocol (just like Ordinals in Bitcoin) stores the information on the blockchain, which grants decentralization to the projects and collections that use this method. This first version of Ethscription only allows you to submit images no larger than 96 KB and its creator provided a guide for submissions in 60 seconds. Furthermore, the protocol ignores those duplicate data. A first wave left a balance of 30,000 registrations in less than 18 hours, comment Lehman. Lehman took advantage of the launch to introduce Ethereum Punk, a platform that brings CryptoPunks to the smart contract network blockchain. “why should all contractless Punk collecting happen on Bitcoin?” the developer writes, alluding to the fact that this collection started signing up without smart contracts on the Bitcoin blockchain via Ordinals.
Etehreum Punk brings the famous Bitcoin NFTs to Ethreum. Source: Ethereum Punk. For its part, Ordinals has already demonstrated since its inception how Bitcoin can provide its users with mechanisms to store information that is valuable to them. So far there have been almost 13 million registrations in Bitcoin, leaving a balance in commissions of more than 1,700 BTC.
